The US ambassador to London, the Democratic Party fundraiser Matthew Barzun, likes to tell of how he learned a few words of Welsh in the lead-up to the 2014 Nato summit in Newport, only to find that the locals spoke English. Dafydd Cameron took a different route on a recent foray to lecture the Welsh Tories in Cardiff. A copy of the speech he delivered was punctuated by phonetic translations. He was advised to say that the Wales minister Alun Cairns is from “Ysgol [pronounced Usgol] Pontardawe” and that he’d tell Labour’s Stephen Kinnock “da iawn” [pronounced “dye yown”, meaning “very good”] on 7 May when he comes second to the Tory candidate for Aberavon, the China-born “Edward Yi He [pronounced Yee Hay]”. Labour used to do the same with the word-mangling John Prescott after he stumbled over Slobodan Milosevic.

Disloyal of Danny Alexander to exclude Nick Clegg from Talk of the Glens, the eight-page glossy magazine given out to his Highlands constituents. There’s a recipe for Danny’s sausage and butternut squash stew, a crossword, an approving reference to Harriet Harman’s “ginger rodent” gibe, photos galore and an interview with his dad, Di, a former fireman. But no mention of Clegg. Indeed, all references to the Lib Dems are restricted to the back page. It seems the man who styles himself “Our Champion” is going it alone. Danny will have only himself to blame if he loses.

The Great British Battleaxe, Christine Hamilton, is selling cereal bars. Christine will soon appear on television fronting an ad campaign for the weight-loss range Slim-Be. The larger-than-life (though she claims to have dropped a dress size by eating what she’s flogging) Tory-turned-Ukip activist is, like her husband, Neil, the ex-MP, increasingly disillusioned with the Purple Shirts. Farage made it clear there’s room for a solitary ego in the party and his own is insatiable. At the rate the party is falling in the polls, it could yet win Political Slimmer of the Year.

To Leeds, and Morley’s magnificent, colonnaded old town hall. The Grade I-listed Victorian masterpiece boasts a bust of Herbert Asquith, a local lad who for eight years in the Edwardian era was Liberal prime minister. The current MP is Ed Balls. A copy of his notorious tweet (of his own name) was auctioned for £250. The fundraiser was split with Dewsbury, where Labour’s Paula Sherriff (younger sister of Lee Sherriff, standing in Carlisle) hopes to overturn the Tory barrister Simon Reevell’s vulnerable 1,526 majority. The talk in Dewsbury Labour ranks was of a Conservative action day to flood the former mill town’s streets with activists. They couldn’t fill a taxi.

From breakfast TV to culture secretary? That’s the word on Gloria De Piero if Labour wins the election.

Kevin Maguire is Associate Editor (Politics) on the Daily Mirror and author of our Commons Confidential column on the high politics and low life in Westminster. An award-winning journalist, he is in frequent demand on television and radio and co-authored a book on great parliamentary scandals. He was formerly Chief Reporter on the Guardian and Labour Correspondent on the Daily Telegraph.

Hannan Fodder: This week, Daniel Hannan gets his excuses in early

Since Daniel Hannan, a formerly obscure MEP, has emerged as the anointed intellectual of the Brexit elite, The Staggers is charting his ascendancy...

When I started this column, there were some nay-sayers talking Britain down by doubting that I was seriously going to write about Daniel Hannan every week. Surely no one could be that obsessed with the activities of one obscure MEP? And surely no politician could say enough ludicrous things to be worthy of such an obsession?

They were wrong, on both counts. Daniel and I are as one on this: Leave and Remain, working hand in glove to deliver on our shared national mission. There’s a lesson there for my fellow Remoaners, I’m sure.

Anyway. It’s week three, and just as I was worrying what I might write this week, Dan has ridden to the rescue by writing not one but two columns making the same argument – using, indeed, many of the exact same phrases (“not a club, but a protection racket”). Like all the most effective political campaigns, Dan has a message of the week.

First up, on Monday, there was this headline, in the conservative American journal, the Washington Examiner:

“We will get a good deal – because rational self-interest will overcome the Eurocrats’ fury”

The message of the two columns is straightforward: cooler heads will prevail. Britain wants an amicable separation. The EU needs Britain’s military strength and budget contributions, and both sides want to keep the single market intact.

The Con Home piece makes the further argument that it’s only the Eurocrats who want to be hardline about this. National governments – who have to answer to actual electorates – will be more willing to negotiate.

And so, for all the bluster now, Theresa May and Donald Tusk will be skipping through a meadow, arm in arm, before the year is out.

Before we go any further, I have a confession: I found myself nodding along with some of this. Yes, of course it’s in nobody’s interests to create unnecessary enmity between Britain and the continent. Of course no one will want to crash the economy. Of course.

I’ve been told by friends on the centre-right that Hannan has a compelling, faintly hypnotic quality when he speaks and, in retrospect, this brief moment of finding myself half-agreeing with him scares the living shit out of me. So from this point on, I’d like everyone to keep an eye on me in case I start going weird, and to give me a sharp whack round the back of the head if you ever catch me starting a tweet with the word, “Friends-”.

Anyway. Shortly after reading things, reality began to dawn for me in a way it apparently hasn’t for Daniel Hannan, and I began cataloguing the ways in which his argument is stupid.

Problem number one: Remarkably for a man who’s been in the European Parliament for nearly two decades, he’s misunderstood the EU. He notes that “deeper integration can be more like a religious dogma than a political creed”, but entirely misses the reason for this. For many Europeans, especially those from countries which didn’t have as much fun in the Second World War as Britain did, the EU, for all its myriad flaws, is something to which they feel an emotional attachment: not their country, but not something entirely separate from it either.

Consequently, it’s neither a club, nor a “protection racket”: it’s more akin to a family. A rational and sensible Brexit will be difficult for the exact same reasons that so few divorcing couples rationally agree not to bother wasting money on lawyers: because the very act of leaving feels like a betrayal.

Problem number two: even if everyone was to negotiate purely in terms of rational interest, our interests are not the same. The over-riding goal of German policy for decades has been to hold the EU together, even if that creates other problems. (Exhibit A: Greece.) So there’s at least a chance that the German leadership will genuinely see deterring more departures as more important than mutual prosperity or a good relationship with Britain.

And France, whose presidential candidates are lining up to give Britain a kicking, is mysteriously not mentioned anywhere in either of Daniel’s columns, presumably because doing so would undermine his argument.

So – the list of priorities Hannan describes may look rational from a British perspective. Unfortunately, though, the people on the other side of the negotiating table won’t have a British perspective.

Problem number three is this line from the Con Home piece:

“Might it truly be more interested in deterring states from leaving than in promoting the welfare of its peoples? If so, there surely can be no further doubt that we were right to opt out.”

I could go on, about how there’s no reason to think that Daniel’s relatively gentle vision of Brexit is shared by Nigel Farage, UKIP, or a significant number of those who voted Leave. Or about the polls which show that, far from the EU’s response to the referendum pushing more European nations towards the door, support for the union has actually spiked since the referendum – that Britain has become not a beacon of hope but a cautionary tale.

But I’m running out of words, and there’ll be other chances to explore such things. So instead I’m going to end on this:

Hannan’s argument – that only an irrational Europe would not deliver a good Brexit – is remarkably, parodically self-serving. It allows him to believe that, if Brexit goes horribly wrong, well, it must all be the fault of those inflexible Eurocrats, mustn’t it? It can’t possibly be because Brexit was a bad idea in the first place, or because liberal Leavers used nasty, populist ones to achieve their goals.

Read today, there are elements of Hannan’s columns that are compelling, even persuasive. From the perspective of 2020, I fear, they might simply read like one long explanation of why nothing that has happened since will have been his fault.

Jonn Elledge is the editor of the New Statesman's sister site CityMetric. He is on Twitter, far too much, as @JonnElledge.